Re: how should remote path names be handled?
Thomas A. Fine <fine@cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: Thu, 22 Apr 93 18:20:33 -0400
From: Thomas A. Fine <fine@cis.ohio-state.edu>
Message-id: <9304222220.AA14348@soccer.cis.ohio-state.edu>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: how should remote path names be handled?
X-Mailer: Perl Mail System v1.2
>Your examples were all correct. Any missing infromation
>is taken from the left hand end of the URL of the referring
>document. When a relative path is given (no protocol,
>hostname or leading /) then the rule is to strip
>everything off the current URL which is to the right of
>its rightmost "/", the append the relative path.
>This is always what you expect, except that it might
>surprise you if you don't think too hard that in directory
>/a/fred, "bert" refers to /a/bert, not /a/fred/bert, so
I think you need to clarify this. If you are in a document inside of
/a/fred/ then bert should refer to /a/fred/bert. If you meant that
fred is a document (the current one) inside of a, then bert should
refer to /a/bert.
>/a/fred/bert should be referred to as "fred/bert" or "./bert".
>Anyway, you are right, and if there are browsers which do otherwise
>that is their problem, unless I've goofed.
Should the browser collapse a .. path by itself, or pass it on to the
server:
in http://server/foo/bar/baz/doc.html
translate ../../cool.html
to http://server/foo/bar/baz/../../cool.html
or http://server/foo/doc.html
And I should note that collapsing the path is a very trivial operation.
tom